


Surpassingly Lonely

by draculard



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Cannibalism, Canon deaths, Corporal Punishment, Emotional Manipulation, Graphic Descriptions of Disease, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, In a very broad interpretation of the word 'watersports', M/M, Necrophilia, Self-Mutilation, Sexual Violence, The relationships are not the focus this is mostly a character study, Watersports
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-06-30 11:43:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19852468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: He crinkles his eyes. He stretches his lips.He tries to simulate joy.





	Surpassingly Lonely

He wishes he could suck Gibson’s cock outside. He likes to imagine taking it into his mouth, getting it nice and wet and warm — then pulling away and watching the saliva freeze. Gibson’s cock, hard and pink, beneath a scrim of ice; Gibson’s face, twisted with pain, with horror.

But that’ll come later, of course, if it comes at all. 

This isn’t the first time he’s sucked another man’s cock, but it may well be the last, and not because he plans to die anytime soon. There’s nothing enjoyable about this for Hickey; can he put up with Gibson’s fingers tearing at his hair? Yes, easily. Can he endure the painful stretching at the corners of his mouth, the roiling of his gag reflex over Gibson’s cock, the way his stomach muscles spasm as he swallows Gibson’s rancid cum?

He can do more than endure it. He can crinkle his eyes at Gibson like he loves this, like he sees something in Gibson’s face — pleasure, arousal — that makes this shit worthwhile and erases the ache of his knees against the cold, wooden floorboards of the orlop deck, the scrabble of rats over his feet, the injustice of once again submitting himself to another man.

This encounter isn’t entirely without strategy on Hickey’s part. Everything he says and does here, today, is necessary. He considers it an investment — Gibson needs a show of good faith, a grand gesture to tip him over the edge. To convince him to acquiesce to all future liaisons, to reciprocate this moment whenever Hickey pleases, to accept whatever attentions Hickey sees fit.

He’s played this game before, from both sides. He’s been doing this since he was a boy. 

The trick is to smile.

* * *

It isn’t the whipping that scares him. It’s the possibility of infection. Hickey has never experienced a contaminated wound, and he doesn’t ever intend to. When he was six years old, he saw a man so sick with syphilis that the flesh sloughed right off his calf as he was walking through the street, leaving his tendons and bone exposed. 

In the workhouse, he saw boys his own age missing noses or with the thick, scaly film of ichthyosis on their hands; with open, suppurating sores and green-tinged gaping wounds; with fungus devouring their skin until it looked as though they’d taken baths in acid; with near-invisible maggots squirming in their gums.

He kissed a boy once with the taste of blood on his lips, and watched a month later as that boy wasted away and died on the workhouse floor. 

Hickey hasn’t kissed anybody since. He doesn’t miss it.

And he _is_ scared of infection, even if he’s not afraid of pain. It doesn’t hurt him to admit this; even gods have their little private phobias, and Hickey may be smaller and thinner than the other men onboard, but his body is whole. 

His health is sound.

His wounds — numerous, over the years — have been small and well-tended, each one cleaned carefully, thoroughly, and monitored for infection with an obsessive eye. This is different.

This is Hickey with his trousers ‘round his ankles in front of all the other men — the officers who despise him, the enlisted men who trust his smile, who know they can rely on him for an extra pouch of tobacco or a second sliver of salted pork.

This is the cat-o-nine, stiff from the cold, with a scrim of ice over the tightly-woven fibers, slicing right through what little flesh he has and leaving strips of it to hang against his thighs.

This is blood running down Hickey’s thighs, the first warm thing he’s felt since this godforsaken ship left Beechey Island. Something happens to his mind, and though he hears himself stifling cries of pain, he barely feels the whip against his arse at all. He sees Francis Crozier’s face, all smug satisfaction, all superior. He sees Dr. McDonald waiting in the wings, pale-faced, lips bitten, ordered to stay and watch Hickey’s punishment before he can see to the other men.

He sees plague rats in the shadows with teeth that have grown too long, too yellow.

His senses heighten for what comes after: the trip to Dr. McDonald’s scurvy den, anonymous hands wrapped around his shaking arms. He thinks for a moment that he can see the diseases running rampant over every surface in the sick bay. A man on a gurney looks at him, opens his mouth, shows off the blackened, swollen gums that have swallowed his teeth, and Hickey can see the microscopic — what does the doctor call them? — animalcules floating toward him on the air, reaching out to him with tendrils, leaving dark stains on his skin.

He closes his eyes.

He bites back a wave of nausea.

“It hurts,” says Hartnell.

“It hurts,” says Manson. “It _hurts,_ Cornelius. Doesn’t it hurt?”

He bares his teeth. He tries to grin.

“It’ll fade,” he says.

The pain is the last thing on his mind. 

* * *

He smells rum.

Not the watered shite they dole out at meals — _real_ rum, pure rum. He slips on the strange, gritty ice which surrounds the ship, looks down and sees unfrozen pools of brackish liquid lying on the surface.

Not pools of it, he realizes — lines of it, trails of rum splashed out deliberately, all leading to the tents at Carnivale. 

And then he hears a noise like an implosion, and the line of rum seems to ignite, flames racing over it from behind Hickey and leading straight to the men inside.

The sails catch fire.

He smells paint burning, sees it peeling off the tents. He hears screams. Is Crozier screaming, somewhere in there? Is Fitzjames? Are they running for the exits? Are they stumbling over their own men, scrabbling at each other’s skin?

He’d very much like to see a burnt corpse on the ice. He watches the flames grow, watches fire consume the Carnivale until the light has turned him blind, until smoke has blackened the tip of his nose and left his face red and raw.

Then, with a sigh, he reaches into his pocket and grabs his knife. He can see the crowd inside wriggling beneath the surface of the tent, pushing at the sails like an unborn baby pushes at its mother’s skin. He kicks the obstacles away from the tent walls, but the men inside have already given up, are pushing away, driving each other into a corner.

So Hickey finds that corner.

So Hickey, alone on the outside, feels people pressing at the fabric, howling for release, and tells them to stay back. To stop pushing. To calm down, just for a second, so he can cut them free.

If it were him inside, he wouldn’t be screaming. That much he knows.

He would be watching the flames. 

* * *

It doesn’t escape his notice that the man who slumps through the hole in the newly-opened tent is Dr. McDonald, the man who cleaned his wounds, who saved him from the misery of infection. When the fire is put out, Hickey will learn there’s only one surgeon left. 

“I can tell you’re upset,” Gibson whispers to him so much later. “I know he was kind to you.”

 _That isn’t it,_ Hickey wants to scream. He’s never trusted kindness in his life. What he trusts is that Dr. McDonald, like Hickey, hated disease, and would do anything in his power to stop it.

But he can’t tell Gibson that, can he?

What _can_ he tell Gibson?

“I killed him, Billy,” he says, so quietly he’s certain no one can hear. He feels the resistance of McDonald’s flesh against his blade, the gush of warm, slick blood across his fingers. 

And Gibson squeezes his arm, a silent gesture of reassurance, of comfort, and whispers, “I know, love.”

And then he walks away, because he doesn’t.

* * *

He’s a boy again, and he’s in the streets of Liverpool, crouching barefoot on the cobblestones outside the abbey. Lumps of coal lay strewn about for the taking, dropped by the delivery cart just moments ago, and he knows if he collects them here, no one will fight him, because the other boys are all afraid of the monks.

But the monks won’t scold him or anyone for taking coal. It’s the dead of winter, and no Christian man would cuff a boy for taking coal scraps off the streets.

Or so they say.

The crux of the matter is, Hickey doesn’t want to be warm, not like other people do. His favorite season is winter; his first love is the ice. He could have taken another workhouse boy’s shoes before he came here, but he didn’t. He wants to feel the cold leaking out of the cobblestones and into his feet.

He wants little red sores to form on his fingers and toes from the cold so he can rub them and relish the dull ache. He wants to watch those spots turn waxy white, then blue. He wants to watch them fade away again come spring.

So he wanders into the street without shoes on to fetch coal he doesn’t even want for the workhouse fires.

So he strips off his shoes and runs barefoot through the fresh-fallen snow, just to see how it feels.

So he stands on a thin scrim of ice in an alleyway, smelling the trash and raw sewage of England’s worst city, prepubescent and naked with his first kill lying dead on the ground nearby, cock still hard and red, and he looks up at the moon. And it’s red too, the first red moon he’s ever seen.

So he takes off his winter slops and his Welsh wig and his comforter and his uniform, and he folds them up on the strange, gravelly ice, and he’s crouching there, naked, when Lt. John Irving comes over the ridge.

It’s quick work. Mindless work.

It’s almost like dancing.

When Irving is dead, Hickey pushes aside his slops and finds the front of his trousers damp with urine. He unbuttons them, his fingers numb but deft, and exposes Irving’s still-leaking prick to the cold Arctic air.

It’s still soft, still warm when he puts it into his mouth. The taste of Irving’s piss is salty — almost a pleasant flavor after so many years of Goldner’s tinned food and Diggle’s biscuits. It seems like it’s in Hickey’s mouth forever before it hardens, rigor mortis setting in and giving Irving a raging erection like he surely never experienced in life.

And then Hickey pulls back, and watches in satisfaction as his saliva freezes on Irving’s cock. He flicks the head, feels the hardness of the ice against his nails, watches the cock bob stiffly, lifelessly, over Irving’s mutilated corpse.

“Only rats copulate out here, eh, Irving?” he says.

* * *

They say it’s seal meat that hangs him — bits of blubber found in Irving’s stomach when Goodsir cut him up. But that’s not the only thing they found, he knows, even if they never admit it, never tell a soul.

Most of Irving’s cock is in Hickey’s stomach.

Some of it, lovingly stripped from the severed appendage with Hickey’s knife, carefully coaxed down the corpse’s throat, is in Irving’s. 

He accepts the rope around his neck with good-natured ease. He detests braggadocio, but it’s no boast to say he feels no fear. It’s only the truth. His smile is genuine; his humor is no farce. 

Beside him, Tozer is shaking. In the crowd, he sees Hodgson’s furious face, sees Gibson’s trembling lips. They’re worried for him; they’re scared.

But the tightening of the noose around his neck, the scratching of minuscule rope fibers against his skin, excites him in ways they could never understand. Ways he could never relate to anyone here.

It’s almost a disappointment when Tuunbaq attacks.

It’s almost a sin to be free.

* * *

It occurs to Hickey as he’s eating Gibson that this is yet another thing his lover would never understand. 

Other men view human flesh as something sacred. Other men believe in souls. In a fundamental difference between mankind and animals.

Hickey was willing to accept these rules when he was young, until he attended his very first service in a papist church and spied three hundred men and women — even children — extending their tongues to receive the Eucharist, pink muscles glistening and jutting from their jaws, waiting pathetically for the flesh of a long-dead man to light upon them. An obscene, holy sight that seared into Hickey’s brain and affected him like nothing else.

 _So the rules mean nothing,_ Hickey thought.

_So people can break or follow them as they please._

_So the distinction is meaningless._

If it’s any consolation to Billy — and it’s not, of course, because even Hickey cannot console the dead — he eats each and every strip of flesh with love. As Christ loves the papists, so Billy loved Hickey, and the evidence of that is clear in the way each bite of Billy’s body leaves Hickey feeling warmer, feeling stronger, feeling sharper. 

And he loved Billy back, or at least it’s plausible that what he felt was some muted form of love, that what he feels now is grief in its most nebulous form. Not strong enough to bring tears, not faint enough for Hickey to wave it away. So watered-down that to identify it would be nearly impossible, the same way he never knows precisely when he’s happy, but at least he knows it’s there.

He wishes he could remember Billy’s last words, but the taste of flesh has driven them away.

* * *

Cutting out his tongue is simple. There is pain — a lot of it — but not unbearable. There is blood, slicking his fingers and loosening his grip on the knife, but not so much blood as to distract him from his task. And there are things watching him — Crozier, on the ground, eyes wide and lips drawn tight. Tuunbaq, with its dark, hooded eyes so like his own.

But even with these complications, it’s simple. He severs his tongue at the root; he feels it come free in his hand; he crinkles his eyes at Tuunbaq to show his joy. He pretends not to see Crozier staring at him from the frozen ground with those uncomprehending eyes, the eyes of a man who doesn’t know, who will never understand.

The trick is to smile.


End file.
